Why It All Looks So Easy, and Why It Isn’t

WALL OF GREEN The 30-foot vertical garden at the Stella McCartney show.Credit
Damien Blottière for The New York Times

Paris

When people talk about the fashion “system,” they generally have no idea how socially intricate that organism can be. Even the jaded professional spectators who spend months each year following the circuit are unaware of the effort that goes into the 15 or so minutes that are all a designer gets to grab them, entertain them and stimulate their commercial appetites.

It’s unlikely that the 900 guests who filed into Stella McCartney’s show here Thursday morning, and took a seat on bleachers freshly upholstered in white felt, gave a moment’s thought to the NASA-scale intensity that goes into mounting it, or almost any, fashion show.

There were the clothes to consider, of course, a product of months of decisions and manufacturing and revision resulting in this particular pair of wooden shoes with burned-in patterns and this particular crepe de Chine and this parachute silk and this pattern of hand-blocked flower-patterned silk georgette. But the clothes are just a single dimension of what, at any particular moment, a fashion show is about.

There was the naturalistic look of the hair, conceived over weeks of meeting between Ms. McCartney and Eugene Souleiman, the English hairdresser. There was the light girlish makeup she created in collaboration with the properly celebrated maestro Pat McGrath. There was the obscure music on the soundtrack, which Tony Farsides — an English radio D.J., now retired from the business, and a man whose name evokes an entire era for anyone who spent a night in a 1980s London nightclub — put together using tunes largely found on the Web.

“I got Soko, this French singer who’s not even signed to a label, through a blog,” said Mr. Farsides, whose name is pronounced Far-SEE-duss and who last season, for a McCartney show, used a raunchy Pase Rock song about Lindsay Lohan’s habit of going without underpants.

“This is the 10th show I’ve done for her in five years, and in that time I’ve gone from buying vinyl in shops to taking everything I use off blogs and YouTube,” Mr. Farsides said. When he finds music by people he likes, he goes to their MySpace pages to see if they have friends who are even better. “If someone you know says they like something,” he said, “you can get find it in two minutes, no delay.”

Besides Mr. Farsides backstage at 7:00 on Thursday morning, there was a complement of professionals including dressers, caterers, photographers, a sound crew, producers, model agents, a model casting director, the models themselves and their minders and chauffeurs. There was Sam Gainsbury, the producer, covering her stocking feet with surgical booties before testing out the pure white catwalk at 7:15.

“Can’t I do this in heels?” Ms. Gainsbury asked. No, she was told. “But if I take off my boots, I’m going to lose my power,” she said. “Useless, feeble, totally weak.”

As Ms. Gainsbury said this, several technicians who work for the eccentric green-haired botanist Patrick Blanc busily went about sprucing up the fronds of Dryopteris dilatata Crispa Whiteside and Polystichum polyblepharum and Carex flagellifera, to name 3 of the 30 plant species used to erect a 30-foot version of one of his famous vertical green walls.

“What I wanted was to have something real and living,” explained the pregnant Ms. McCartney, who showed up at 7:30 with her toddler son, Miller, and infant daughter, Bailey. “We don’t really talk about it much,” she added. “But, as a brand, we work with organics a lot, and so I wanted to put a little more into it than just another backdrop for another show.”

Although Ms. McCartney would not specify what it cost to add this element to her show, to have 2,000 plant specimens, a mile of felt batting, an aluminum wall frame and PVC irrigation system erected over two long nights of intensive labor, it would be safe to say that one could buy a snappy new green BMW sedan for about the same price as le mur végétal. But then, what kind of thinking is that, at a time when carbon credits are more chic than YSL Tulip shoes?

“And we don’t keep the wall,” Ms. McCartney went on. “It’s being broken down right after the show and going to an area of Paris where there is low-income housing, and then rebuilt.” As she said that, the fashion throng started filing into the theater and taking seats and riffling through papers and, it must be said, showing only cursory interest in the wondrous green construction devised to amuse them for a quarter-hour.

“What is that at the top of the runway?” one magazine editor asked, speaking to no one in particular. “It looks like a big salad,” she said, answering herself.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Why It All Looks So Easy, and Why It Isn’t. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe